Palen project raises concerns across Coachella Valley

Impact of projects along Pacific Flyway migration route could hinder alternative energy development

Nov. 9, 2013

A 459-foot tall solar tower, surrounded by thousands of reflecting mirrors, is one of three towers about to go online at BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah solar project in east San Bernardino County. Intense radiation from the mirrors, aimed at a boiler on top of the tower, is melting the feathers of some birds flying through the project, which could also occur at BrightSource's proposed Palen plant east of the Coachella Valley. / Desert Sun file photo

The Desert Sun

What the commission wants to know

The four key questions from the California Energy Commission about BrightSource Energy’s proposed Palen solar project: 1. Are incidental take permits available or necessary under the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the state Fully Protected Species Act, and at what point would such permits be required for the incidental deaths of any species covered by the laws? 2. Based on available evidence in the official record, what should the commission conclude about the likely or potential magnitude of avian mortality at the project and what measures should be used to weigh the impact? 3. Should the Energy Commission require the project to take additional steps to avoid avian mortality, including possible curtailment, if project operations were to result in excessive bird deaths. 4. What modifications should be made to ensure public transparency of a technical advisory committee that will formulate and monitor plans to minimize bird deaths. Source: The California Energy Commission, www.energy.ca.gov

The laws

■The Migratory Bird Treaty Act: Originally passed in 1918 and now covering 1,026 species, the federal law prohibits anyone from pursuing, hunting, taking, capturing or killing any migratory bird covered by the law, unless allowed by regulations. The law does not allow for incidental takes, that is, the unintentional killing of species as the result of a lawfully permitted project. ■The Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act: Passed in 1940, the federal law prohibits any “take” of bald or golden eagles, or their parts, nests or eggs, alive or dead, without a permit. ■Fully Protected Species Act: This state law predates the California Endangered Species Act. It covers 37 species, including 11 bird species and prohibits any incidental take “except for collecting these species for necessary scientific research and relocation of the bird species for the protection of livestock.” Sources: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, www.fws.gov and California Department of Fish and Wildlife, www.dfg.ca.gov

The first block of solar panels at the 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight project is almost complete in a photo taken in September. Desert Sunlight is one of two utility-scale projects now under construction in the Riverside East solar zone, 148,000 acres of public land between Joshua Tree National Park and Blythe. Courtesy of Desert Sunlight. / Courtesy of Desert Sunlight.

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The picture is unsettling and disturbing.

A small bird, barely the size of a human hand, had its wings reduced to a web of charred spines. No longer able to keep aloft, the bird was found on the ground after it had flown through the intense heat of a solar thermal project soon to go online in the California desert.

The photograph, taken at BrightSource Energy’s Ivanpah plant in east San Bernardino County, has raised the stakes for the company’s proposed Palen project east of the Coachella Valley. Months from final state and federal approvals, Palen could put two 750-foot-tall solar towers and thousands of reflecting mirrors near two of the region’s key refuges and stopping points for birds migrating along the Pacific Flyway.

The project is roughly 50 miles from both the Salton Sea to the southwest and the Cibola National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona to the southeast.

“A migrating bird has to be in top form, having the flight feathers in really good shape,” said Kimball L. Garrett, ornithology collections manager at the Museum of Natural History of Los Angeles County, who has not seen the picture from Ivanpah, but has long been concerned about bird deaths at large solar projects.

“If some of its flight feathers are damaged, what does that mean for the rest of the bird’s migration?” he said. “It weakens feathers. These are things people don’t study because — how can you?”

Trying to estimate how many birds could be injured or killed at large-scale solar projects, and what might be done to prevent mortalities — has become a pressing concern for solar developers and environmental agencies as these projects multiply across California.

Of the 34 birds reported dead or injured at Ivanpah in September, 15 had melted feathers. Dozens of other bird carcasses, not singed but with critical injuries, have been found in recent months at two solar projects about to go online on public land between Joshua Tree National Park and Blythe, a town of 20,800 on Interstate 10 near the Arizona border.

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Last month, 19 birds, 16 of them water fowl or marsh birds, were found dead at Desert Sunlight, a 550-megawatt photovoltaic plant about 50 miles east of Indio. The carcass of a Yuma clapper rail, a federally endangered, medium-sized marsh bird, was found at the project in May.

Environmentalists aired their concerns about potential bird deaths at Palen at a recent public hearing on the project, and days later, state officials issued a call for more information on how to minimize chances of birds being singed or burned.

A key question raised by the California Energy Commission in its Nov. 1 memorandum was how to measure when bird deaths might be “excessive” enough to consider a temporary shutdown of the plant.

The commission also asked whether the project might require official permits allowing the unintentional death of certain animals — called incidental take permits — under federal and state laws covering migratory birds, bald and golden eagles and other protected species.

BrightSource, federal, state and local agencies, and environmental and tribal groups are invited, but not required, to provide answers to the commission’s questions as part of legal briefs typically submitted during the permitting process for large solar plants. The deadline for briefs regarding the Palen project arrives later this month, with parties allowed an additional week to file rebuttals.

The briefs will be followed by a draft final decision, which will eventually go to the commission for a vote of approval.

The questions were triggered by two days of public hearings on the 500-megawatt solar thermal project late last month at UC Riverside’s Palm Desert campus. Energy Commissioners Karen Douglas and David Hochschild heard sworn testimony from the agency’s own biologists that the plant’s impact on birds could be significant and impossible to offset.

The problem is the intense radiation — called solar flux — from the project’s 170,000 reflecting mirrors that will surround two 750-foot-tall towers, more than twice as tall as the Morongo Casino, Resort & Spa in Cabazon. At 340 feet, the casino tower is the tallest building in Riverside County. Sunlight from the mirrors will superheat liquid in boilers at the top of the towers, creating steam that in turn will power a turbine.

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Pacific Gas & Electric has contracts with BrightSource to buy the electricity from the plant, which could power up to 200,000 homes.

BrightSource declined to comment for this story, and company representatives have consistently avoided discussing bird mortality. Prior to the hearing, the company submitted a presentation on possible methods for scaring birds away from harm. Barking dogs or trained falcons might be effective, depending on the species, the report said, but those methods would need to be researched before any conclusions about effectiveness could be drawn.

Radio-controlled airplanes or water-cannon or shotgun blasts also might prove effective, but only with sustained onsite monitoring. Fake owls might prevent mortality, but only until the birds get used to the statues.

Experts are dubious about most of the methods in the report.

“Birds don’t have a way to adapt and learn,” said Garrett. “They are only experiencing that area briefly, once a year or once in a lifetime.”

“Owls won’t work, barking dogs, cannons making a series of booms — birds tend to habituate to those things,” said Robert McKernan, director of the San Bernardino County Museum, who in the 1980s did some of the first studies on bird deaths at an early solar tower project near Daggett and at wind farms in the San Gorgonio Pass.

“You’ve got to look at the relative width of that envelope that’s off the tower,” he said, referring to the solar flux coming off the mirrors that will surround the towers in concentric circles, spreading out over the project’s 3,800-acre footprint.

At the same time, both McKernan and Garrett said the bird deaths at solar projects need to be seen in the larger context of mortality rates for migratory birds in general, which are already high from natural, as well as man-made causes. Millions of birds die yearly flying into windows and buildings, they said.

“A few golden eagles killed by wind turbines is significant — they are large, long-lived birds that don’t have high reproduction rates — whereas a dozen mallards or ruddy ducks probably on a population level is pretty insignificant,” Garrett said.

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“The problem is gauging cumulative impacts,” he continued. “How do you come to grips with all the cumulative impacts of buildings and wires and wind turbines and mirrors? And how many suffer some damage and are able to fly away from the site and then die or are compromised? Any known mortalities are the tip of the iceberg.”

Many migratory bird species are now in decline, due to climate change, drought and habitat loss, McKernan said.

Industry in flux

The Riverside East solar zone, as the public land between Joshua Tree and Blythe was designated, is a solar-industrial corridor along I-10 that federal officials once envisioned with up to 80 percent of its 148,000 acres covered by panels or mirrors.

Today, that seems unlikely. Industry trends are toward smaller solar projects and the Department of Energy’s loan-guarantee program has ended. Still, the region could see a significant number of projects. NextEra Energy has three projects either under construction or approved in the zone.

The first phase of Genesis, a 250-megawatt solar thermal project, using large parabolic troughs instead of solar towers, is scheduled to go online by the end of the year, as will Desert Sunlight, which Next Era owns with GE Energy Financial Services and Sumitomo Corp. of America. The 750-megawatt photovoltaic McCoy project is approved, and its first 250 megawatts are likely to begin construction next year, company officials reported earlier this year.

If approved, Palen will be the second solar tower project in the region. Santa Monica-based SolarReserve also expects to break ground on its 150-megawatt Rice project, located just outside Riverside East near Highway 62.

Two other photovoltaic projects are in the pipeline: EDF Energy’s 150-megawatt Desert Harvest, near Desert Sunlight, approved but as yet unfinanced, and NextEra’s 485-megawatt Blythe project, which the company bought from bankrupt Solar Trust of America and is now repermitting.

It is, at present, impossible to gauge how many birds might be at risk if all the projects are built and go online, said Eric Davis, assistant regional director for migratory birds and state programs at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

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“Bird migration studies have to wait for bird migrations,” he said. “It’s not like we’re going to have the answers in two weeks. This is going to be months and years of trying to better understand the problem and then make better management decisions as we gain more scientific understanding.”

Along with radiation injuries, scientists are concerned about bird deaths linked to confusion over the shimmering expanses of solar panels in the desert. At photovoltaic projects such as Desert Sunlight, dark, flat solar panels are now spread out over hundreds of acres in what may look like a big lake to migrating birds flying high overhead.

Water or shore birds attempting to land on the panels either could hit them with enough force to injure themselves or, stranded on dry land, be unable to take off again.

Davis said that based on animal autopsies, or necropsies, the cause of death for many birds at Desert Sunlight has been blunt force trauma from the animals colliding with panels mistaken for water.

“With power towers, it’s different,” he said, referring to Ivanpah. “The solar flux has singed some birds. The heat has denatured the protein in their feathers, and they can’t fly.”

First Solar, the Arizona company building Desert Sunlight, has consistently downplayed the possibility of the panels themselves drawing the birds. More than 60 percent of carcasses on the site have been found away from panels, said Steve Krum, director of global communications.

“First Solar isn’t aware of any evidence linking photovoltaic solar panels at Desert Sunlight or any other (photovoltaic) solar project to bird fatalities,” he said in a statement emailed to The Desert Sun. “We’re working alongside agencies to gather more information and believe that more data is required to ensure a measured approach to addressing these issues.”

One of the questions before the California Energy Commission is whether certain levels of bird mortality are permitted.

Davis said that incidental takes are not allowed under the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act, originally passed in 1918 and now covering 1,026 species. State and federal wildlife agencies have launched an ongoing investigation of the deaths and are working with BrightSource, First Solar and other solar developers to formulate best practices for how to minimize the risk to birds.

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While participating in the investigations, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife will not submit any briefs on the commission’s questions, spokesman Andrew Hughan said.

Both he and Davis stressed that while their agencies are concerned, the relative newness of solar technology and its impacts on bird species will make ongoing research key for developing effective prevention and mitigation plans.

Echoing the still-early nature of the investigation, Ken Celli, the commission’s hearing officer on Palen, said the questions issued Nov. 1 should not be viewed as any indication of commissioners’ final thinking on the project.

“The briefs direct the Commission committee to the law and the issues that the parties believe support their positions,” Celli said in an email response to questions from The Desert Sun. “The briefs are used to help the committee as they draft a . . . proposed decision in response to issues raised by the parties.”

Environmental advocates were similarly hesitant to speculate on the significance of the commission’s actions.

“These are technical, legal questions; they’re not simple issues,” said Lisa Belenky, senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental watchdog group that plans to submit a brief to the commission.

Yet another unknown is the financial impact on Palen if the commission decides to make project approval contingent on additional and possibly costly mitigation requirements.

BrightSource bought the project from bankrupt Solar Trust of America last year. Originally planned as a solar thermal project using parabolic troughs, Palen had won approval from the Energy Commission but not from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which must also sign off on the project.

Oakland-based BrightSource and project partner Abengoa Solar, a Spanish developer, are now repermitting the project as a solar tower plant with both agencies and have been pushing for approval by early next year, a deadline they need to meet to get the project financed and online by 2016.

The companies are already lobbying the commission to ease up on proposed mitigation measures for Palen’s potential impacts on tribal sites and artifacts within a 15-mile radius of project’s towers, such as funding an updated field manual and website on tribal trail networks.

Speaking at the hearing in late October, Matthew Stucky, manager of business development for Abengoa, said the expense of those measures alone could make the project “difficult or impossible to finance.”